Mountain Sounds

Where is Monessen and why are we going there? What do you mean you grew up there, you always tell people you’re from Pittsburgh! And why is the trip so long, I’ll miss Jessica’s birthday party. These were the questions that Sara asked of her father as she pouted and packed her Powerpuff Girls suitcase. Her brother apparently didn’t have any concerns about the trip so long as his Game Boy had enough batteries for the car ride.

“I don’t want you kids becoming city slickers,” her dad said in jest. “Now, quit complaining. You’ll have the rest of the summer to see your friends.”

His daughter’s incessant questioning had some merit. Even Stan wasn’t entirely sure why he was going, let alone taking his children with him. He swore he would never go back. But how could he let go of a place which had so thoroughly shaped him? Was the city not shaping his children in its own particular way? Sara could plot a route on a subway map before she fully knew how to read and Raymond could do some fairly worrisome stunts on his skateboard. They knew nothing of catching salamanders, or how to walk quietly through the woods, or how to identify constellations in the night sky. It would be good for them to see the mountains and get some fresh air.

The seven hour drive was grueling and cycled between the kids needing pit stops, Stan cursing the map for being no use in getting them back to the highway from small town roads, the kids making a racket playing some game they’d invented, Stan trying to refold the map, the kids bickering, needing to stop for gas, and so on.

“You two - look out the window for half a second and appreciate what’s around you.” Stan’s face had clouded over in the way that it did sometimes and both of his daughter and son immediately complied, looking up form their book and Game Boy respectively. A mountain range had sprouted up around them and they were headed for a tunnel which bore a blue sign that read “Allegheny Mountain.”

“Can you believe they made a tunnel through that big mountain?” Her father asked appreciatively.

She could believe it, actually, because she took the subway every day and therefore had personal experience for where tunnels could be made. “It’s very pretty here,” she said instead, feeling wise for a third grader. The tunnel was long and winding and lined in dim yellow lights.

“So we’re staying with your cousin?” Ray asked. “I didn’t know you had a cousin.”

“My father had six brothers and sisters. So, I’ve got plenty of cousins,” Stan said.“Her name’s Marcie. Her mom was my Aunt Lisa.” Raymond and Sara glanced and each other. Raymond shrugged.

The kids had quietly drifted back to their previous activities when they were instructed to look out the window once more. Their eyes fell upon a long winding river that glittered in the sun, towering smoke stacks which produced no smoke, and red brick buildings that lined the short main street, half of which were boarded up. Metal frames of the mills stood stoically in front of lush, green mountains which stood proudly before the cornflower blue sky.

“This used to be a very important place,” Stan said. He shook his head. He no longer needed a map of any kind and he pulled up a long, steep gravel driveway. “This is the same house Marcie lived in when we were kids,” he said, as they all got out to stretch their legs. Sara thought the air smelled different here, in a pleasant way. Marcie came out to greet them, leaving a small dog with an underbite to bark at them from the door. She had cropped hair and soft pillowy arms and greeted them each with a hug.

“I never thought I’d get to meet Stanley’s kids,” she said. “Look at you two!” She shepherded them into the house. The living room had dark wood paneling and a plush red carpet. The kitchen featured a plethora of apple accents which were present on the dish towels, the napkin holder and the wallpaper trim along the ceiling. Sara hadn’t known apples could be a theme but found it cheerful.

Standing in the kitchen Marcie asked, “Yuns want some pop?”

Sara looked uncertainly at her father who started wheezing with laughter. Sara smiled weakly, unsure what was funny.

“You know, Marcie, I’ve got two city kids on my hands. They don’t know what pop is.”

When the matter was finally settled, each of them accepted a soda and settled in to listen to the adults, which was typically what their father expected of them. There was a review of the itinerary, in which Sara and Raymond learned just how many people they’d be meeting this week, but also the revelation of a few surprises. They would be going to an amusement park called Kennywood, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, a state park with a creek that doubled as a slide, and a candy store where the outside looked like a gingerbread house. All of this was more than acceptable to Sara, who chided herself for not trusting her father to curate a wonderful adventure.

“Sounds like a busy week. You’re gonna need another vacation, Stan!”

He allowed the children to excuse themselves to go play in the backyard and didn’t call them back inside until the sky faded to a muted orange and the lawn was dotted with blinking fireflies.

In the morning they left Marcie’s house to meet their dad’s cousin Benny and his wife Carolynn. The small, cluttered house was filled with the smell of bacon grease and cigarettes. One hung from Carolynn’s lip as she offered to prepare them eggs any way they wanted.

Sara again looked at her father with uncertainty. He laughed and patted her shoulder. “You know, she might just have toast and juice.”.

Carolynn looked concerned. “You don’t like eggs? Just got em straight from the chicken. They’re the freshest you’ll ever get. Real good for ya.” Her skin was worn and leathery. There were approximately one million vertical creases on her upper lip. “Do you eat eggs, hon?” She directed her question at Raymond who requested scrambled with ketchup.

Benny moved several stacks of magazines and papers from atop the plastic table cloth to the floor against the wall. “Gosh, Stan, it’s real good to see you again,” he said, sitting down at the table. He had a friendly look about him. His bright blue eyes danced like he was about to play a prank on someone. Stan took the seat adjacent and Carolynn brought over mugs of coffee.

Sara took it upon herself to set the table while Carolynn carted out piping hot eggs, bacon, toast and orange juice. Sara dallied in the kitchen for a moment, still hoping to avoid eating an egg of any kind, and busied herself looking at a grocery list on the refrigerator which read “tomatoe, butter, stake.”

“Last time I saw you was your dad’s funeral. How long’s that been?”

Carolynn nodded grimly, chiming in, “Five? Six years now?” She dolled bacon out onto everyone’s plate.

“Sara come sit down here with your brother,” Stan said.

Benny leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his belly. “Your old man was a piece of work right up til the end. You remember when he had all of us working for him at his General Store?”

Stan laughed. “Yeah, it was a good thing he had some many nieces and nephews to cycle through. But I think you were the only one he liked.”

Benny’s eyes got wide and he shook his head. “I don’t know about that. He fired me after two weeks.”

“He fired Marcie after one day!”

Benny reached across the table to grab some toast and a heaping spoonful of scrambled eggs. Raymond ate his breakfast contentedly while Sara pushed hers around on her plate.

“Why’d he fire you?” Stan asked.

Benny shook his head and rubbed his eyes with one of his giant hands. “He didn’t like the way I stocked the shelves. I tried arranging some things a little different to make em look nice and he got mad. Good grief did he get mad. He threw a jar of something at me and got more mad when I jumped out of the way. Then he charged me for the jar that ‘I broke.’ I went home cryin, telling my mother how rotten he was. Boy, was I upset.” He waved his hand vaguely in the air. “Can’t be mad about that now, it was more than forty years ago.”

“Where does the time go?” Stan asked with a laugh that was mostly an exhale. “I was the only one who didn’t get fired but man do I wish I could’ve. I used to carry boxes from the delivery truck into the basement every week for years. I found out later he could’ve had some kind of conveyer belt installed to get the boxes down but he said he didn’t want to pay for something like that, that’s what he had me for.”

“He was cheap, wasn’t he?” Benny asked and they laughed until they tired of laughing. It would take Sara a few more years to understand that sometimes you laugh at things that aren’t exactly funny. “So, what’re you kids gonna be up to this week? Hopefully something more exciting than talking to your dad’s old fart of a cousin.”

At first Sara had reasoned that the family visits would be a necessary toll for the amusement park and candy shop and such, so she was surprised to find she had a great deal of interest in the general store, the town, and her dad’s previous life. She planned to collect these snippets of memories the way one might gather the smooth, round stones that lined the creeks here.

They also went to see Jim - a man that half the town still referred to as “Spud” because of some time he ate multiple pounds of mashed potatoes in one sitting. But Sara and Raymond had been instructed to call him Jim. They’d had to gather his address and a lengthy set of directions from Benny.

“J——- C——- it’s a good thing this car has four wheel drive,” her dad said. Raymond was playing his video game but Sara was grinding her teeth looking out the window. There was no guard rail on the winding mountain road. She gripped the door handle while looked at her dad’s serious face in the rear view mirror and his capable hands on the steering wheel.

They finally arrived at a double wide trailer and a faded red truck at the end of what could barely considered a road. A thin man with a grey pony tail was standing with one knee cocked to the side and a rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Jim!” Stan called. “Hey, Jim! Don’t you recognize me?”

“Hoe—lee S—-,” was the reply. “You’re just as ugly as I remember. You should know better than to drive up a road like this without giving a man a warning.”

Stan got out of the car and his kids gingerly followed. “How was I supposed to get in touch with you? You don’t have a telephone!”

Jim shrugged as if that wasn’t a valid reason and offered a firm handshake.

“Well,” Jim said simply. “Come on in.”

The inside was tidy and Sara was surprised to admit it was nice. There were jugs of water on the kitchen counter, a few cases of beer, and jars upon jars of pickled goods on a bookcase.

“Do you even have electric up here?

“No,” said Jim with a shake of his head. “No electric, no running water. There’s a well, an outhouse, and the woods. That’s it.”

Stan started laughing. “You hear that, you two? If you have to go you go outside.” Sara cringed which made her dad laugh harder. “What do you do if there’s an emergency?” Stan asked.

“I can either take of it myself or I can’t.” Jim opened two beers and set them out on the small table in the living room. “Yuns want water? I don’t have pop.”

“No, thank you,” Sara said, being uncertain what was meant by ‘well water.’ She also wasn’t keen on consuming unnecessary fluids given the lack of a toilet.

“Jim has always been an outdoorsman,” her dad said. “When we were little he would go hunting with a bow and arrow.” Raymond’s interest was immediately piqued.

“Mhm,” Jim said, sipping his beer. “A wild boar chased me up a tree one time. Could’ve kilt me. I got im though. People will tell you there’s no wild hogs around here but they don’t know anything. The kind of people who never go outside.”

“When me and Jim were little we were hardly ever inside.”

Jim nodded seriously. “Hardly never. Hardly never sat down, neither. You would work all day for your old man and then come play in the woods. Not sure how you had the energy. We were always fishing or catching chipmunks or making forts. That time you wore holes in your socks because we were sliding down slag heaps outside the mill all day…? I thought your old man was gonna send you to your maker.” His thoughts drifted off for a moment. “What is it you do now anyway?”

Stan inhaled slowly, “I’m a doctor.”

“Hm.” Jim nodded.

By the middle of the week, both Raymond and Sara could hardly keep their eyes open past 8 o’clock, every day had been so packed with activities. They were in their pajamas, having left Marcie and their dad in her kitchen.

“I have something for you,” Marcie said to Stan holding out a newspaper. “I was going to mail it to you but then you called and said you were coming. I just had to dig it out of the closet.”

Sara propped herself up on her elbow from the couch, wanting to see the newspaper article but also fighting to heaviness of her eyelids, which felt like lead weights.

“Do you remember Peter Wagner?”

Stan knitted his eyebrows together and smiled, “Yeah, we called him Little Pete from down the street. He used to come fishing with us sometimes.”

“Mhm, well he still lives round here and he has a column in the local paper. Don’t ask me what he has to write about every week, but he put something in his column about your mother.”

At this Stan scowled in doubt, “My mother?”

Sara got up from the sofa to read the article in her father’s lap. It was titled “Dinner of a Lifetime” and there was a picture of a woman with soft features and dark hair standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Her dad’s read-a-loud voice wasn’t very good but she followed along with him:

Food and memory are one and the same. My daughter - a “foodie” - recently asked me if I had a favorite meal and I was transported back to Christmas of 1969, when I was eighteen years old. It been an eventful and tumultuous year; we watched in awe of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Woodstock empowered the counterculture generation, and I was a 1-A Draft. Despite the many defining moments of that year, I still vividly remember Betty DiFiore and her marvelous ravioli dinner.

As the son of German immigrants, I grew up eating sauerkraut, rye bread, and the occasional bratwurst (when we could afford it). Dining out typically meant hamburgers and milkshakes in those days. That Christmas was the first time I’d ever tasted the richness of olive oil in a homemade tomato sauce or the tenderness of pasta dough made from scratch.

I have no doubt that her cooking was truly as good as I remember, but I’m also not naive enough to believe that my fondness of that Christmas was related to food alone.

The entire neighborhood was crammed into her home that evening. Joy, warmth, and laughter were not in short supply. Mrs. DiFiore was like a mother to us all. She was revered for her kindness and patience which have been unparalleled to this day.

This article is only a small way to honor her memory and the love this town had, and will always have, for her.

“She’s been gone such a long time. That was her last Christmas…,” Marcie said and Sara was surprised to see so much pain in her face. “I’ve never known anyone else like her. She was probably the only person in the world who could’ve loved your father.” Marcie busied herself with some loose thread on the tablecloth and Stan was quiet. “Being around her was like… it was like feeling the sun on your back.” She looked up at Sara. “I wish you could’ve met her. You look just like her. You’re a lot like her, too.”

Sara had never seen herself as having any kind of effect on others and never expected to be paid such a compliment. She was surprised to find the lump in her throat that always accompanied crying.

“Can I have a copy of this?” Stan asked.

“That’s yours, Stanley. That’s for you.” She patted the paper.

When the time came to leave the sprawling green mountains, the babbling creeks, the abandoned steel mills, and the empty smoke stacks, Sara asked, “Can we come back next summer?”

Her father didn’t answer for a while. On the passenger seat lay the article about his mother.

“I don’t think so, honey.”

“Why not?” She asked, indignant. “It was really fun. You’re from here. Your family’s here.”

Stanley shook his head. “I’m not really from here anymore,” and followed the signs east, towards New York City.